


who cares who fired the gun?

by moanna



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: F/F, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-10
Updated: 2015-06-10
Packaged: 2018-04-03 18:31:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4110849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moanna/pseuds/moanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Is this how it always ends then? She asks and there’s even a smile, big, determined. She smiles like she does everything -- focused and clear and straightforward and passionate and.</p>
<p>No. Sometimes you kill me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	who cares who fired the gun?

**Author's Note:**

> Cross-posted at the MG Ficathon on LJ.

It’s the chorus of a symphony repeating through ages.

 

Maybe we were Cain and Abel. Maybe this is god’s punishment, she whispers. Or maybe it’s you, the words coming out of your mouth as the thoughts appear in your head.

 

Do you think we were gladiators? In an arena, caught, captured, glorious, doomed.

 

Doom. You could be Romeo and Juliet, doomed lovers, star crossed, woven weaved dizzying. Do you have to hold the gun to kill the other, or can you kill with words. Have not can, you think, because in all likelihood it’s both.

 

We could be spies, in the Cold War, seeking the other, and I’m disguised as a waiter and you’re in some fancy cocktail dress -- red, sleek -- a diamond bracelet on your wrist, ordering a gin and tonic without looking up from the menu, a wide brimmed hat. You’re at the table now, and she is standing next to you, and it’s all so familiar and all so foreign.

 

How can it be both?

 

How can it not be?

 

You almost wonder aloud if you’ve had this conversation before but you know and she knows that this is it. You have this one time. One time in what could be forever. Or for as long as this will go.

 

\---

 

It’s impossible for Zoe to be certain if it was Irina who found her, or if she had found Irina, or if they both had found each other -- had they ever even been lost, in hiding, or had this always been the final destination, the path they would walk and follow even when it had been obscured?

 

They are together in Marrakech, they were always meant to be together in Marrakech, finding and losing and hiding and there.

 

And while the events may have always ended up this way, and while she may have been acting as she did just for these events to happen, for Irina to end up here, and for Irina to have looked through the scope of her gun and identified Zoe in the crowd, for her to have stared straight back into that scope, and for Irina to turn, quicker than she had shot Zoe before, and gun down the man who had led her there, it is still hard for her to believe that her faith would bring her here, to Irina kissing off a smirking expression from her face, to hands, to _them_. This path, this path in Marrakech, where they are together, is perhaps a path that they have always been walking on, but that doesn’t make it any less foreign, any less new.

 

This newness which apparently involves Irina pouncing onto the bed, making the frame creak beneath her, even though Zoe knows she could be silent if she liked, straddling her hips while Zoe attempts in vain to pull the sheet over her face and ignore the other girl’s presence, as futile an action as that may be.

 

She is successful until she feels something wet dripping onto the sheet, when she concedes to lifting it away from her face, greeted with the image of Irina posed over her, orange in one hand and knife in another, peeling out chunks of the fruit and eating them, tossing the peels in a pile on the mattress.

 

“These sheets cost more than the combined wardrobe of your entire lifetime, I hope you know that,” Zoe grumbles, her sleepiness dulling the usual biting tone.

 

Irina reveals no reaction in her face, but continues cutting away at the orange and pops another slice in her mouth, sucking out the fruit while juice drips from her chin and fingertips, then splitting her face into a grin, the peel covering her teeth.

 

She spits it into Zoe’s face before Zoe has time to react, the grin staying put. “I made breakfast darling.”

 

Her voice was shocking to Zoe, the first time she heard it, still is, the preserved accent so unlike her own now long-abandoned native accent, but there’s a gentleness too, a softness, or lightness, which seems so at odds with the directness in her, well, everything else. But her voice is _hers_ , distinctly distinct, also like her everything else.

 

Zoe picks up the peel from where it has fallen into the crook of her neck, rubbing it between her fingers as she looks back up at Irina, her face now bent over her frame, only feet away, inches really. Her well-trained look of disdain is again on her face, and she can still feel the stickiness of the orange’s juice dotting her skin from where the peel had fallen, and Irina is no longer cutting the orange but drawing her knife, a steak knife, along the inside of the remainder of the peel in her hand.

 

The light is getting brighter from behind the thin curtains drawn over the window, and Zoe can hear more and more noises that signal the awakening of the city. It’s early, likely, far too early, and she should mind much more than she does the pressure of Irina’s thighs around her hips, should not be so easily distracted by the morning sun lighting up her still messed from sleep hair or the softness in her eyelashes as they flutter closed, but it’s early, it’s early and she’s too tired to should.

 

“How do you think today will end?”

 

Irina’s eyes are focused on her own now, unblinking, unabiding. Zoe returns her gaze, the soft question hanging in the inches between them.

 

She raises her fingers to brush against the knife’s blade, trailing up to the fingers that hold it, resting her hand over Irina’s, before responding.

 

“Ideally, with you washing these sheets so they don’t smell like oranges forever.”

 

It is not what her eyes are saying, or what Irina’s eyes are saying in response, but they both know the unimportance of speech, the impossibility of their fates, the immutability in a day.

 

It’s funny how events seem to happen like that, they happen, and happen again and again.

 

\---

 

The blood is warm, and you’re not sure who it’s from even , if that matters at all. You hold her, pressing your hand to the hole in her side, as if on instinct, and she looks just as she did earlier, her breathing is steady, her eyes as clear, pointed, as ever. She is dying.

 

Is this how it always ends then? She asks and there’s even a smile, big, determined. She smiles like she does everything -- focused and clear and straightforward and passionate and.

 

No. Sometimes you kill me.

 

You feel it then. The holes and scars. A sharp feeling around your neck, a hollow in your head, near the jaw. Sharpest is the splitting of your back, shattering around a hole blasted through your spine, spreading out and in and around until a numb sets in.

 

She feels it too and you can see it in her face.

 

It’s just a dance. She says as she re-adjusts herself, and the blood falls on your hand.

 

Just a dance, you repeat.

 

The music sets in. There are no tears.

 

 


End file.
